High Availability and Site Resilience are the key terms we
hear everywhere in the IT Industry, when it comes to Exchange Server this
becomes a crucial topic, Microsoft team has done lot of improvements on this essential part from
a very long time and the evolution of these concepts had went far beyond
imagination and still we can expect more to come in the mere future.

I am writing this post today to give a quick recap on the
evolution of High availability and Site Resilience concepts from Exchange Server 2007 through the
upcoming Exchange Server 2016 by providing you with cumulative collection of references to the TechNet Articles, TechEd \ MS Ignite Videos
available on demand in Channel9 .

Let’s Begin with Exchange Server 2007 SP1 where Microsoft
team introduced LCR, SSC and the vital CCR and SCR concepts which
revolutionized the Messaging Environment HA & SR concepts that was the seed
to the recent enhancements.

Next comes our Exchange Server 2010 which made significant
changes to the High availability and Site Resilience concepts from his
predecessor Exchange Server 2007 and introduced the concept of DAGs which stands as one of the great
innovation of Microsoft and evolved to a greater extent with every version of
Exchange till date.

Exchange Server 2013
was introduced with lot of new features and Architectural changes that added
fewer more new innovations to Exchange Server like Managed availability, Data
Center fail over, AutoReseed etc. and with the release of Exchange Server 2013
SP1, DAGs are further enhanced to provide more HA & SR features like DAGs
with Dynamic Quorum and Dynamic witness etc. Now we have options to deploy DAG
witness server in Azure and even Exchange Servers on IAAS in Azure etc.

Exchange server VNext or Exchange sever 2016 is on the way
and Microsoft team gave us the glimpse of what we can expect in the next
version of Exchange during MS Ignite this May and below session and EHLO Blog
post is the best place to begin to know more on the upcoming innovations related to our topic.

I am planning to do a write up on my favorite topic “Exchange Hybrid Deployments” soon with
some good references and real time examples to give you guys an experience on the evolution of Exchange hybrid deployments. I would call this as the “future
deployment model” for Exchange sooner or later, that combines the features of both
On premises and Cloud to provide a seamless experience for Managing the E-mail Infrastructure without compromising the latest innovations on the move from
Microsoft with Office 365 .

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Microsoft team officially made the most awaited announcement today, Azure AD Connect is now generally available for all Azure AD customers including Office365 customers. Azure AD Connect is the single tool and experience for connecting your on premises directories to Azure AD, whether you are evaluating, piloting, or in production.

We can expect more updates on this new Tool after its GA from the community, Most of the Organizations can now utilize this Tool to migrate to Office 365 at ease. With this release we can eliminate the deployment complexity of Dirsync \ AAD Sync and AD FS and also take advantage of more advanced features as explained here.

Along with this, Azure AD Connect Health is also now generally available for Azure AD Premium customers. Azure AD Connect Health is a cloud based service and a key part of our effort to help you monitor and secure your cloud and on-premises identity infrastructure.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Lets have a look at the new Skype for Business Online Service Description, Many advanced features has been introduced in this new version and to utilize them you need to know what is available with each Plan and adopt the best one to your needs.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Today I spend some time reviewing Microsoft Ignite sessions available on demand from channel9and came across this essential breakthrough session from Administering Office 365 with the latest innovations from Microsoft.

Microsoft team introduces the suite of Office 365 Admin tools that can do more for you on an Administration and management standpoint in day to day operations from advanced reporting to effective monitoring on the move.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Microsoft team recently released seven new features to Exchange Online Protection, EOP is currently enhanced at an rapid rate with many strong features added periodically that ensures that Microsoft is providing a secure email environment.

As stated in the official EHLO blog post, Update Rollup 10 is the last scheduled release for Exchange Server 2010. Both Exchange Server 2010 and Exchange Server 2007 are in extended support and will receive security and time zone fixes on-demand on a go-forward basis.

For Hybrid deployments ensure that your On premises environment is updated to the current update or the one before to stay inline with Microsoft best practices for Hybrid.

As always deploy these updates in your Lab environment and plan for production upgrades, since the current Rollup and cumulative updates seems stable for a while we can expect this release also to be a standard one, but we never know until the community confirms the same in the upcoming days. stay tuned for further updates.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Organizations that require granular control over the application access and true SSO deployed ADFS servers in their environment for quite sometime, implementing and managing these servers is quite challenging and the Administrator who is going to handle the day to day operations should have strong knowledge on ADFS, from how it works to some more advanced topics in a nutshell.

Microsoft team has released the below ADFS Deep-Dive Series to provide adequate knowledge to ITPros, reading these blog posts are quite essential for every Administrator who work with ADFS and a crucial requirement for an consultant, who works on Office 365 deployment for larger enterprises, that involves true SSO experience.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Hope many of you are aware about the recent Office Mechanics video session presented few weeks ago by Julia White MSFT on what's coming next in Office 365, an excellent walk-through session that provides an clear overview on the new innovations ahead with Office 365.

Admin roles in Office 365 was introduced to provide delegation of access to appropriate individuals for managing Office 365 workload, now Microsoft team has moved one step further and provided us with the ability to assign workload-specific admin roles for managing your Office 365 organization with more control over how your Office 365 administrators access your data.

When an admin assigned to a workload-specific admin role, he would only have access to the relevant controls and settings associated with that workload, that provides more granular level access assignment as required rather than assigning Global Administrator role for managing only one service.